Ross agrees with part of John’s Culture11 argument that Iraq is central to the GOP’s woes, but concludes:

But in this particular election cycle, I actually think the McCain camp’s broad approach to the issue – emphasize the successes of the Surge, criticize Obama for opposing it, promise to leave Iraq with honor, and downplay the question of whether we should have invaded in the first place – has been pretty much the best possible tack a GOP candidate could take.

It is difficult to disentangle the possible alternatives for the GOP this year from the reality that a majority of Republicans still think invading Iraq was the right thing to do and don’t want to withdraw and the related matter that realist Republicans need not–and did not–apply for the presidential nomination.  On this latter point, it is also important to emphasize that even if realist Republicans had been inclined to run for the nomination they are all pro-war anyway, which points to a deeper problem in the party.  In other words, even if we could imagine a scenario in which the GOP nominates an openly antiwar candidate as a way of neutralizing the clear Democratic advantage on this issue, we run up against the rather harsh political reality that there were probably not enough Republican voters who could have propelled such a candidate to the nomination, and the even harsher reality that this nominee would have had difficulty uniting the other two-thirds of the party behind him.  In addition to the limited support within the party, a realist antiwar candidate would have to contend with the problem that antiwar voters in the GOP primaries split their votes among various pro-war candidates indiscriminately, so that even in a very divided field the antiwar candidate could not have counted on winning with a plurality made up of antiwar voters.

Obviously, once a die-hard war supporter such as McCain became the nominee, repudiating the war was not credible.  Before that, the antiwar position had only one champion in Ron Paul, who was sufficiently radical in his critique of U.S. foreign and domestic policy that he was never going to be able to assemble a broad base of support within the post-Bush party.  No other antiwar politicians seriously considered a presidential run, because there were no other antiwar Republicans in federal elective office outside the House except for Lincoln Chafee and only a few within the House.  There were no antiwar governors, so far as I know, or if there were they did not volunteer this information to the public.  The media frenzy around Hagel’s procedural and tactical disagreements with the administration was evidence of how the most minimal deviations from the administration line came to be treated as evidence of antiwar Republicanism for lack of having many actual antiwar Republicans.  In the end, even Hagel’s minor deviations were considered so disqualifying that his presidential run flopped before it began. 

There were so few antiwar politicians in the Congressional GOP and none among Republican governors because most of the rank-and-file remained supportive of the war, and party and movement activists made any attempt to change course in Iraq grounds for being purged and punished.  It is because of this structural bias against antiwar politicians that there were no other antiwar candidates and so a vanishingly small chance of an antiwar candidate mounting a presidential run and an even smaller chance of one winning the nomination.  This bias actually became stronger in the wake of the ’06 defeat as a few of the original war opponents in the House Republican caucus lost their bids for re-election and as the “surge” became the only important test for party loyalty.  So as a matter of practical politics, Ross may be right that the GOP had to obsess about the “surge” and demagogue Obama’s withdrawal plan, which helps drive home how debilitating lockstep support for the war has been and how much it crippled the GOP’s chances of responding to the public’s obvious repudiation of the war.  Iraq destroyed the GOP and badly damaged its credibility on national security in the eyes of a majority of the public, but the continuing Republican support for the war and support for making the pro-war position the one absolute litmus test did even more damage by making the GOP incapable of adapting to the shift in public opinion between 2004 and 2006.  The surviving House members are probably going to conclude that their position on Iraq needs no examination, just as they concluded after 2006, and as the GOP’s numbers in the House and Senate dwindle even more there are going to be fewer and fewer elected Republicans who do not come from safe seats and deeply “red” states, which probably means that there will be even less interest in re-examining the Iraq debacle.